If Mac was a “bit of a Jehu,” he certainly was a “dead homer,” for after miles of scrub and grass and timber, we came out at our evening camp at the Bitter Springs, to find the Head Stockman there, with his faithful, tawny-coloured shadow, “Old Sool em,” beside him.

Dog and man greeted us sedately, and soon Dan had a billy boiling for us, and a blazing fire, and accepted an invitation to join us at supper and “bring something in the way of bread along with him.”

With a commonplace remark about the trip out, he placed a crisp, newly baked damper on the tea-towel that acted as supper cloth; but when we all agreed that he was “real slap-up at damper making,” he scented a joke and shot a quick, questioning glance around; then deciding that it was wiser not to laugh at all than to laugh in the wrong place, he only said, he was “not a bad hand at the damper trick.”  Dan liked his jokes well labelled when dealing with the unknown Woman.

He was a bushman of the old type, one of the men of the droving days; full of old theories, old faiths, and old prejudices, and clinging always to old habits and methods.  Year by year as the bush had receded and shrunk before the railways, he had receded with it, keeping always just behind the Back of Beyond, droving, bullock-punching, stock-keeping, and unconsciously opening up the way for that very civilisation that was driving him farther and farther back.  In the forty years since his boyhood railways had driven him out of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, and were now threatening even the Never-Never, and Dan was beginning to fear that they would not leave “enough bush to bury a man in.”

Enough bush to bury a man in!  That’s all these men of the droving days have ever asked of their nation and yet without them the pioneers would have been tied hand and foot, and because of them Australia is what it is.

“Had a good trip out?” Dan asked, feeling safe on that subject, and appeared to listen to the details of the road with interest; but all the time the shrewd hazel eyes were upon me, drawing rapid conclusions, and I began to feel absurdly anxious to know their verdict.  That was not to come before bedtime; and only those who knew the life of the stations in the Never-Never know how much was depending on the stockmen’s verdict.

Dan had his own methods of dealing with the Unknown Woman.  Forty years out-bush had convinced him that “most of ’em were the right sort,” but it had also convinced him that “you had to take ’em all differently,” and he always felt his way carefully, watching and waiting, ready to open out at the first touch of fellowship and understanding, but just as ready to withdraw into himself at the faintest approach to a snub.

By the time supper was over he had risked a joke or two, and taking heart by their reception, launched boldly into the conversation, chuckling with delight as the Maluka and Mac amused themselves by examining the missus on bushcraft.